A dozen or so books.
He had to read them all—or rather, memorize them all.
Magister Eliot, apparently satisfied that he had repaid his debt, took his leave. Gret stood before the table, gazing at the thick stack of textbooks in front of him, and let out a soft sigh.
He held out his hand to gauge the height. A dozen or so books, each a little larger than the 16mo books of his previous life, were stacked from the sturdy oak tabletop all the way up to his neck. If he leaned forward and lowered his head, his chin would rest right on top of them.
This much, huh...
No big deal.
What medical student's textbooks, workbooks, and atlases didn't add up to at least a person's height?
Following Magister Eliot's instructions, Gret flipped through the pile. The first book: couldn't read a word. The second: couldn't read a word. The third: still couldn't read a word...
Crash!
Were they all written in Magic Script?
So I have to learn a language before I can study magic?
And it's a dead language, too...
Clinging to a last shred of hope, Gret flipped from the first book to the last. He found that all the basic textbooks apart from Magic Script Studies explained spell theory in writing he couldn't understand. With no other choice, he returned the other books to the shelves, opened the last one, and began struggling tooth and nail with Magic Script.
The CET-4 vocabulary list: 4,500 words.
He'd memorized it in a month back then.
The CET-6 vocabulary list: 5,500 words.
He couldn't remember how long he'd taken to memorize it. Anyway, he'd squeezed it in under the pressure of his major courses, and he seemed to have passed CET-6 pretty easily.
Magic Script...
How many words were in this dictionary, anyway?
Gret had never counted, and he didn't want to.
The only thing he knew for sure was that Magic Script Studies was the thickest of the nearly hundred books on the shelf. The others were no more than a fist's width thick, while this one was two fists thick.
The print was tiny, too. If the writing in the other books was in large print, or even a size larger, the characters in this one were only about the size of standard print.
This thing was almost as big as the Cihai dictionary...
Gret silently wailed. He gritted his teeth and opened to the first page, then felt as if he'd been whacked over the head again.
The book's layout was haphazard. It seemed to be written in whatever order the author thought of things—or arranged by whatever the author considered most important. The first page began with the Four Great Elements, listed in order: fire, water, wind, earth.
He turned the page. Magic, dragon, spirit, origin, Mars, Venus, sun, Saturn.
The third page. The macrocosm, the microcosm, birth, death, sage, devil...
Gret: ...
I want a dictionary!
I want all the words arranged in alphabetical order!
At least give me an alphabet first, aaaah!
The English alphabet, the Japanese kana chart, the thirty-letter German alphabet, and the International Phonetic Alphabet—I beg you, come back... I'll never complain that you're too basic again...
But no one answered him.
There was no dictionary, no phonetic alphabet, no one to cast Comprehend Languages and let him master Magic Script instantly, and no Intelligent Brain to scan all the information and etch the unfamiliar language into a database.
After Gret finished silently crying his eyes out, all he could do was pull a pen from his backpack, spread out some paper, and start relying on himself, working hard through the difficulties—
First, he had to catalog every letter that appeared...
After about half an hour, he'd flipped through thirty or fifty pages of the books he had on hand, and his paper was covered in scribbles. Once he was sure no new letters would appear, Gret took a deep breath and started sorting them.
Fortunately, this Magic Script looked somewhat like a Latin-based language. Gret sorted them purely by appearance: anything that looked like an a went first, anything that looked like a b went second. For letters that didn't resemble English ones, he arranged them according to the German and Roman alphabets.
What if a letter looked so strange that it didn't resemble anything at all?
Those went at the very end!
When he finished this round of work, he realized the writing he had to learn wasn't all that complicated after all. There were about sixty letters. Considering that some appeared only at the beginning of words, he could roughly infer that there were uppercase and lowercase forms, which meant there were about thirty letters in total.
Gret flipped through the sheets of paper in his hand, writing a new letter at regular intervals. Then he looked at Magic Script Studies spread open in front of him, took a deep breath, and rubbed his wrist...
He had to reorganize this entire book!
Compiling a dictionary was so hard, so incredibly hard... No wonder the Cihai Dictionary was revised once every ten years. Just revising that book alone could keep half the staff at the Dictionary Press employed. The workload was just that huge...
And now all that work was his alone T_T
Never mind. He'd read webnovels before where some senior characters had to decipher magical languages like codes. Compared to that, he was pretty lucky to have a book he could copy from...
Page by page, Gret copied the words in Magic Script Studies and their Common Tongue definitions beneath the corresponding initial letters. He had to admit, copying things down helped him remember them. At the very least, by the time he finished a page, he'd already memorized everything on it.
Gret worked hard for most of the day, until his eyes were swimming and his wrist ached. He suspected he was about to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. Just as he was tempted to cast a healing spell on his wrist for relief, he realized he'd run into his first problem:
He was out of paper.
He'd brought five or six sheets in all, and both sides were now covered in dense writing. There was nowhere left to write...
Could he tear a blank sheet out of one of the books?
Gret didn't think he could bring himself to do that.
Could he borrow paper from someone?
He didn't dare. Magister German had forbidden copying. Going to ask someone for paper now would be like walking straight into the line of fire!
Could he ask for help and plead with Magister German?
Gret felt he hadn't lived long enough yet. He didn't want to be blasted into a lump of charcoal by a fireball...
He thought quickly for a moment, stuffed the paper, pen, and ink into his backpack, and headed out. He could look at the reference books again tomorrow. If he didn't get back to town now, the shops would close, and he wouldn't be able to buy paper~~~
He dashed back to town and rushed into his house. After closing the door, he went to the square table and moved aside the chair with the broken leg. He then shifted the bricks propping up the chair and dug into the ground beneath them a few times. A small purse lay neatly in the dirt. Gret pulled it out and tipped it over. A little pile of coins jingled into his palm.
Two Silver Coins and seven Copper Coins.
At the other end of the main street was Uncle Simon's bakery, where a loaf of black bread cost one Copper Coin. If he ate sparingly, one loaf could last him a day.
One Silver Coin could be exchanged for ten Copper Coins. This little purse held the original owner's entire monthly allowance.
—His City Guard salary was five Silver Coins a month. When he patrolled the city, he could get a free meal at the barracks. After that, he could still save two Silver Coins a month for other daily expenses.
But if he wanted to buy paper... this probably wouldn't be enough. The level of production in this other world wasn't much better than in the Middle Ages, and from what he remembered, paper and pens were terribly expensive in this era...
Gret hesitated, then crawled under the bed, pushed aside the book chest, and dug a small box out from underneath it.
Lately, my follower count has been growing so slowly... I'll work a little harder and make the story more interesting...
Before you continue